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LEAVING FATHERS OUT
Introduction
1.1
Background to and rationale for the
research
This research report is about vulnerable fathers
and their families and the kinds of policies and
practices that are needed to enable men to
become ‘good enough’ fathers and promote the
safety and welfare of all family members. The
report seeks to contribute to the development of
family policy by generating original data in
relation to families who are struggling to cope,
what we call families in need. These are families
where the integrity of the family unit is under
threat due to relationship problems and parents
themselves have recognised their difficulties to be
good enough parents and/or partners and have
sought professional help, or professionals have
initiated intervention to respond to identified
problems. Children and families experience
adversity in many forms and the aim of this study
was to illuminate as broad a possible range of
coping difficulties, including child abuse and
domestic violence, relationship problems and unmet emotional needs within Irish families. The
study is intended to have direct relevance to the
development of preventative strategies in relation
to child abuse, intimate violence and marital
breakdown and seeks to contribute to the
development of family policies and intervention
practices that are required to respond to them.
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The study does this by focusing in particular on fatherhood, and the needs of vulnerable
men: what we call ‘vulnerable fathers’. This is not to in any way invalidate the needs of
women and children in families, but constitutes a strategic focus on men and fatherhood
in response to increased recognition of their relative absence from policy and practice
agendas (Commission on the Family, Strengthening Families for Life, 1998). There has been
virtually no empirical research done on fathers in Ireland which explores their actual views
and those they live with and this study seeks to contribute to filling at least one aspect of
this huge gap in our knowledge by focusing on families in need through the lens of
vulnerable fathers. Changes in family life, gender relations and childhood have meant that
men are now expected to be more actively involved as fathers and partners
than was the case 30 or even 20 years ago. There is, however, an astonishing
lack of social supports for fathers in Ireland and little recognition of the
Any problems
vulnerability of men or their needs (Ferguson, 2001). Vulnerable men in
fathers may
Ireland are in most respects invisible as fathers, rarely even warranting a
haveCreating
mention in the plethora of debate about vulnerable families, be it in relation
fatherto lone parents, ‘unmarried mothers’, marital breakdown, balancing work
friendly
and family responsibilities, and so on. The only real capacity in which some
spacesonly
‘vulnerable’ fathers are acknowledged in families is as violent, abusive,
contributes
to the risk of ‘dangerous men’. This is of course of vital importance, but even here the
men’s status is ambiguous as even violent men tend not to be engaged with
trauma and
by professionals. It is now commonly acknowledged that in families in need
family
fathers are essentially ignored by health and social services providers and
breakdown
that fathers tend to avoid such involvement (Ferguson, 1998; Hogan, 1998;
McKeown, Ferguson and Rooney, 1998, chapter 7; Milner, 1996; O’Hagan,
1997). Parenting tends to be regarded as synonymous with mothering, and it is with
women and children that professional relationships are formed. This means that fathers are
not engaged with about their role or the parenting - what we call ‘fatherwork’ - they do,
or would like to do, with their children. Any problems fathers may have are not dealt with,
which only contributes to the risk of trauma and family breakdown. In addition, the
potential resources of help and support that fathers may already offer, or have to offer their
children and partners in families in need is largely untapped. In effect, the starting point
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for this research was the fact that little attempt is made to engage fathers or develop men
as carers.
Research has begun to become available to support clinical/anecdotal evidence that this
neglect of fathers applies to all services. The recent major evaluation of the Springboard
family support initiative in Ireland has shown the extent to which this exclusion of fathers
applies even to those services which have been strategically established to work with entire
families at risk and in need.
one element of the family system that is routinely ignored by most
family services is fathers. Despite the best efforts of Springboard to
engage fathers, we have seen that the vast majority of Springboard
time, even in two parent households, is devoted to mothers and children,
although we have no reason to believe that fathers, both resident and
non-resident, are any less in need of support services or are any less
affected by the well-being of the family system. The pattern by which
family services tend to ignore fathers reflects a tendency among service
providers to treat parenting as synonymous with mothering. It is
doubtful if such selectivity between parents – which no doubt is
reinforced by a process of self-selection by some fathers themselves – is
consistent with a family support service in the fullest sense of the word
family. Accordingly, we recommend that services to families - which
should not be treated as synonymous with services to households should give careful consideration to all elements of the family system
and offer supports in a holistic and inclusive manner.
(McKeown et al, 2001, pp 120-1, emphasis in original)
This crystallises perfectly the stage at which research, knowledge and practice are at in
relation to vulnerable fathers: there is evidence of significantly increased awareness of
men’s exclusion from intervention work with families, but with little idea or attention given
to how this can be changed or what ‘father-inclusive’ work might look like. There exists an
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Leaving Fathers Out
almost total absence of engagement strategies in relation to fathers. Against this
background, the core research question explored in this study was how can more
(vulnerable) fathers be effectively engaged with by social care services more of the time?
The core method we adopted to answer this question was to seek out cases where it was
known that at least one professional or service had made real efforts to engage fathers. We
have attempted to learn from fathers who have been service users by eliciting their views
on the services they received, how, or if, they were helped, and what constitutes best
practice. Similarly, we sought to learn from a sample of mothers and children from the
same families as the fathers their views on services, practice and what constitutes effective
interventions. And we explored similar issues with the professionals who
worked with the same fathers and families to enable us to build up a picture
of what effective engagement of fathers involves. This enabled us to
... how can
identify a range of issues, variables and processes which influence the
more
degree to which agencies and individual workers are ‘father-inclusive’ and
(vulnerable)
arrive at a composite picture of what constitutes best practice with fathers
fathers be
and families.
effectively
engaged with The deficits in what we know about such fathers goes well beyond
by social
ignorance of how services can effectively engage them. Little is known
care services about vulnerable father’s definition of themselves as fathers, their
more of the
experiences of being fathered/parented, their feelings about their children
time?
and what they actually do as fathers and partners, their views on
professional intervention and what they feel they need in order to be good
enough fathers. This research report generates original data on these
questions. It also produces original data on the roles and experiences of mothers and
children in families in need, how they view their own lives and the men/fathers in their
families and how they evaluate the professional work done with them. The report also
generates original data on how professionals construct interventions with children and
families, their views on gender relations, the role of fathers and the kinds of work they
actually do - or don’t do - with men and families. Mothers and children were included in
this way in the research design because it is now broadly accepted by family researchers
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that the meanings of what constituted ‘a family’ and how roles and relationships are lived
out need to be explored with the range of actors who are involved with one another in
defining and living out those roles and relationships.
1.2 Aims of the Research
The aims of the study can be summarised on four levels:
■
To document the needs and perspectives on fatherhood and family life of vulnerable
fathers and their partners and children.
■
To examine the factors and processes which lead to the exclusion of fathers from child
and family services.
■
To examine the factors and processes which lead to the inclusion of fathers in child
and family services and to identify good professional practice with fathers and their
partners and children.
■
To identify best practice and develop a framework for policy and professional
intervention with vulnerable fathers and their families.
1.3 Theoretical orientation: a developmental perspective on vulnerable fathers
The research was framed in a context where theoretical perspectives on fatherhood are
beginning to change from ‘deficit’ approaches which focus simply on issues of fairness in
child care and domestic work and what fathers don’t do in families. Research focused
around the issue of ‘domestic democracy’ has shown that in general mothers carry the
primary responsibility for child care and housework, although the balance of who does
what in particular households is multi-layered. Fatherhood and family researchers have
begun to develop ‘generative’ approaches which seek to identify and build on the positives
that men bring to their father role (Hawkins and Dollahite, 1997; McKeown, Ferguson and
Rooney, 1998, chapter 4). This is not to deny the parenting deficits that some men may
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experience, but to focus strategically on developing men’s capacities to care and nurture.
A focus on ‘generativity’ - the capacity to care for the next generation - is at the core of
a new developmental perspective on fatherhood (Hawkins, et al, 1995) which seeks to
enhance men’s capacities and practices of ‘generative fathering’ (Hawkins and Dollahite,
1997). This research study adopts a theoretical perspective which is based on the need to
develop family policy in ways which advance (vulnerable) men’s abilities to practice
generative fathering. Thus we are seeking to move public debates and family
policy beyond the position articulated in much of the existing policy and
... we defined
practice material where a ‘deficit’ model views men in a negative manner,
a ‘vulnerable
for example, by focusing on men who have been violent or abusive and more
father’ as a
generally the attitudunal ‘un’s’ where fathers are depicted as uninterested,
man who is
uninvolved and unable to parent. This study is significantly different in that
known (by
it does not simply focus on categories of abusive men but generates data in
social
relation to the needs and potentials of a wider range of men and fathers. A
service
working definition of families in need draws from instances where (a)
agencies) to
professionals have expressed concerns about parent(s) abilities to function
be struggling
as ‘good enough parents’, or (b) where parent(s) have expressed their own
to be a ‘good
sense of inability to cope with their parenting and relationship tasks. Thus
enough’
we defined a ‘vulnerable father’ as a man who is known (by social service
parent.
agencies) to be struggling to be a ‘good enough’ parent.
1.4 Methodology
The research questions and aims of the study required methodologies which could generate
extensive qualitative data about the experiences of families in need, vulnerable fathering
and professional intervention. In seeking to develop an actual model for intervention with
families in need it was necessary to have detailed first-person narratives of father’s
experiences, as well as other family member’s and professional’s experiences. The core
sample in the study consists of 24 vulnerable fathers/families in need. Families were only
included where there were fathers available - whether resident or non-resident - and
where at least one professional or service were known to have made attempts to work with
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the father. While no doubt there is something to be learned from examples of how fathers
are completely excluded by the system, the primary aim of this study was to learn from
instances where men were worked with. That said, a key finding of the research was that
exclusion and inclusion are not mutually exclusive experiences as all of the men in our
sample, despite attempts having been made to work with them, related stories of being
excluded in the past and present.
Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 fathers, 10 mothers, 11 children and
19 professionals. Separate semi-structured interview schedules were constructed for the
fathers and mothers, children and professionals All the interviews, which lasted on average
between two and three hours, were tape-recorded and transcribed. The lower number of
mothers is explained by three factors: (1) the unavailability of the women in some cases
due to not being service users; (2) women who were service users but did not wish to take
part in the study; (3) the decision by us as researchers not to interview every mother, but
a representative sample so as to leave time and resources for us to prioritise the inclusion
of as many fathers as possible. Similar explanations exist for the lower number of children.
Some children were of course simply too young, and rather than seeking to interview all
the children and young people who were old enough to invite to be included we sought to
include a sub-sample who represented experiences of the kinds of family problems and
intervention approaches in the sample. Thus given the primary focus of the research, the
sample of service users is strategically biased in favour of gaining the perspectives of
vulnerable fathers, but with significant input from mothers and children also.
We aimed to interview at least one professional involved with each father/case and
because some professionals worked with more than one case, the sample of 19
professionals almost covers every case1. Eight of the professionals were statutory social
workers employed in Health Board community care teams, while 11 were family centre
workers. A further crucial dimension to the research method was a case-study approach
1 We missed professionals in a few cases because they pulled out of arranged interviews at the
last minute due to pressures of work or sickness, or because they had left the job.
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where we sought to interview more than one key actor in the same case, and ideally all the
key actors involved. Thus in some of the case studies documented in the report we
interviewed as many as five or six people involved, including fathers, mothers, children,
social workers and family support workers. This approach has the advantage of giving voice
to as many stakeholders in cases as possible and also allowing us as researchers to develop
a variety of perspectives on the same events and processes. This practice of ‘triangulation’
of data strengthens the validity of qualitative research as we are not required to base
interpretations and recommendations solely on the accounts of single respondents in
cases. We were able then to develop our findings on best father-inclusive practice out of
a rounded picture of what fathers, mothers, children and professionals said about how
intervention ‘worked’.
. . . the
sample was
strategically
designed to
include
families
where it was
known that
at least one
professional
or agency
had made
strategic
efforts to
work with
the father in
the family
8
We sought to include families who fall along a continuum of social
exclusion/inclusion: from the most disadvantaged who have contact with such
as homeless services and statutory social work services, to ‘middle-range’
struggling families who are involved with family centres, youth projects etc,
to the least disadvantaged families who use services like family centres and
counselling services. The intention was to explore the experiences of
vulnerable fathers and families across the spectrum of social exclusion/
inclusion.
The families/fathers were accessed through a number of sources: family
centres, residential centres which cater for homeless mothers and children,
and the caseloads of health and social services workers. The agencies
mediated for us by passing on a letter of invitation to take part to all
prospective respondents. Permission to interview children was given by the
parent(s) already engaged in the study. To further enhance the validity of the
data, we avoided taking all the cases from just one organisation and place. We
included organisations which work with children and families and cases drawn
from two geographical research sites: One in an urban area in the East of the
country, the other in the South. The identities and exact location of all the
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participants and services have been disguised in order to protect the anonymity of the
families and individual professionals involved. As already emphasised, the sample was
strategically designed to include families where it was known that at least one professional
or agency had made strategic efforts to work with the father in the family. We were not
interested in including cases where no efforts were made to work with the fathers as we
reasoned that nothing could be learned about how to work with fathers and their families
from cases where fathers were excluded, other than about the dynamics of exclusion and
its effects on women and children, as well as men. This biased the sample towards
intervention work which at the very least had a positive outcome in the minimal sense that
someone tried to include the father. The selection of family centres, for instance, was
influenced by the fact that managers advised us that the centres involved were known to
have made efforts to work with fathers. Similarly, we asked social workers to tell us about
the cases where they had tried to work with fathers as well as other family members. We
have no way of quantifying how much of the work we profile in this report is going on
nationally. Yet even in the context of examining ‘father-inclusive’ practice we still found a
great deal of evidence of exclusion of fathers in the very same cases. If fathers are being
excluded by some parts of the system in the midst of some of the best work that is going
on then we shudder to think what is happening in the worst case scenarios, which we
suspect are extensive. What we can also say with some confidence is that some very
committed work is going on with fathers in families in a context where professionals are
struggling to find ways to engage men and models to work effectively with them. Thus our
sample contains cases where intervention work was effective, where men, and women have
been helped to become better and perhaps even ‘good enough’ fathers and mothers; and
also where intervention work failed to adequately engage fathers. The perspectives of
fathers, mothers and professionals were analysed to produce data which deepens our
understandings of the needs of vulnerable fathers, mothers and children and for the
development of models of intervention with families in need, especially around generative
fathering.
The sample size is clearly small, as is necessary in such qualitative studies to generate the
kinds of detailed narratives from fathers and others that are needed. The qualitative
method we used involved an awareness that the scale of findings that can be produced
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from a large survey, for instance, would not produce the kinds of in-depth data we required
to explore our research questions. We made a conscious decision to sacrifice such
quantitative data in favour of the extraordinary level of detail from the narratives of a
relatively small number of respondents that is necessary to fully explore the meanings of
interventions and identities such as father, mother, child, and ‘helper’. In fact, the
qualitative case-study method we employed is extremely time-consuming in terms of
producing and reading transcripts of interviews and the analysis it demands.
1.5 Problems the families experienced in the sample cases
In finding appropriate fathers and families we were indebted to and dependent on the
agencies who gave us access to their service users. There are however gaps in the profile
of vulnerable fathers, especially concerning the absence of traveller and other ethnic
minority men and their families from the sample. The sample cases ranged along a
continuum of seriousness in terms of levels of concern for the safety and welfare of
children and adults and the risks of children coming into care. Cases placed along this
continuum, starting at the most extreme end, involved:
■
‘high risk’ child protection situations where legal action had already been taken and
children were on supervision orders - due to non-accidental injury (NAI) and emotional
abuse.
■
children were at grave risk of coming into care - due to suspected neglect,
homelessness, domestic violence, alcohol and/or drug misuse.
■
histories of domestic violence, NAI and extreme ‘marital’ problems - leaving fathers in
need of help in caring for their children, some of whom had significant mental health
problems.
■
younger parents without a stable relationship and settled living accommodation
whose child care was considered ‘neglectful’ and borderline abusive.
■
10
extreme difficulties arising for children and their parents from poverty, social
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exclusion, and trying to survive in dangerous communities inhabited by drug dealers
and suspected sex offenders.
■
fathers surviving histories of childhood sexual abuse and growing up in families where
there was extreme domestic violence.
■
relationship problems between parents, children and adolescents, including concerns
about drug and alcohol misuse.
■
fathers who have primary responsibility for childcare, lone fathers who live with their
children full-time and non-resident fathers who's children live with them for some of
the time.
■
couples work, negotiating relationships roles and responsibilities, mediating
separations, and supporting access arrangements.
This list does not of course exhaust all the kinds of problems child and family professionals
work with. It was beyond the scope of the study to cover everything! We are satisfied,
however, that the sample has enabled us to profile the broad range of problems and types
of work that are going on and that need to be developed in work with vulnerable fathers
and families.
1.6 The structure of the report
The report is divided into 6 chapters. Two chapters that provide overviews of our findings
follow this introduction. Chapter 2 explores the dynamics of how fathers are excluded from
child and family work. While chapter 3 discusses what fathers, mothers and children said
about fatherhood, family life and aspects of the intervention work that was done with
them. Chapters 4 and 5 offer a more detailed case study narrative account of the men and
families and the types of professional intervention that worked.
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This detailed analysis of our findings through the use of case study material focuses on
issues of dangerousness and risk, in chapter 4, and how men adjudged to be a danger to
their children and partners were worked with in ways which helped to develop them into
nurturing fathers. While chapter 5 examines the issues arising for intervention work with
younger vulnerable fathers. Chapter 6 concludes the study by drawing together the various
strands of our findings and presenting a framework for ‘father-inclusive’ policy and
practice.
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